Certainly there will be places where the NHL lockout will hurt hockey, where the populace has tuned out and may never again tune in. Toronto is not that place. Here, Sunday’s joy felt unequivocal.

Maple Leafs forward Phil Kessel signs autographs for adoring fans Sunday during an informal skate at the Mastercard Centre for Hockey Excellence in Etobicoke, the team's normal practice facility. The NHL and its players union reached a tentative agreement to end the lockout early Sunday.

“Deepest sympathies to Leafs fans — the pain begins anew,” was how David Chilton, the Wealthy Barber author, put it.

“Who would have thought it? Jan 6th and Leafs still tied for first!” — that from CBC News anchor Peter Mansbridge.

Certainly there are moments in any hockey calendar when the unleashing of eternal jabs at fans of Toronto’s ever-suffering NHL outfit is totally apropos. But easy, haters — Sunday was not that moment.

Sunday was a moment for rejoicing, not to mention greeting long-missed characters from the local soap opera that had gone from dead air to live-on-the-scene after some wee-hours revelations in a New York negotiating room. The NHL and its players association came to a tentative agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement early Sunday morning. And suddenly the locked-out hockey pros — who had their images banished from NHL websites and other franchise-controlled properties since the lockout began Sept. 15 — were back to being the NHL players fans know and love.

Hey, Roberto Luongo! Yeah, we know you’re not huge on coming to Toronto, but on the upside, we’ve got some chi-chi condos where the scenery by the pool makes you swear you’re in South Beach.

Oh, and top of the morning, Brian Burke! Time to get back to the little matter of saving your job.

OK, so maybe some folks line up for this impending sprint of an NHL season with bigger worries than others — although Burke, a lawyer by trade who is always up for an argument, could easily craft a case that no GM should be judged by the 50-game aberration about to unfold.

But again, that and all debate was for another day. Over at the club’s practice facility, where a group of Leafs and non-Leafs from James Reimer to P.K. Subban celebrated the good news with a morning skate, the air buzzed with an undeniable jubilance. Dion Phaneuf, the Leafs captain, signed autographs and did TV interviews while he smiled like a diplomat, apologizing for the labour disruption as he made the rounds. Even Kessel, the Toronto winger and noted introvert, spent a few minutes kibitzing with the happy crowd that assembled to watch.

You can call the fans’ relationship with their beloved Maple Leafs a lot of things. You can call it the enabling foundation of the longest ongoing playoff drought in the NHL — the only drought that has now spanned two lockouts. But what you must call it, based on the overwhelming majority of the available facts, is unconditional.

Certainly there will be places where the lockout will hurt the sport, where the populace has tuned out and may never again tune in. This is not that place. In Toronto, Sunday’s joy felt unequivocal.

Where does the new league order leave the Leafs? The team finished fifth-last in the league last season and failed to make transformational changes to its roster in the interim. But maybe there’s reason to be hopeful. In recent years Burke has insisted that his teams have been playoff-worthy, even if they haven’t been playoff-bound. Burke has been able to point to the front half of this failed season or the back half of this one, and somewhere in there he could locate a team that played at a pace worthy of a post-season qualifier.

So here comes something like half a season — the precise amount of hockey the Maple Leafs are usually apt at handling. Fifty games into last season, for instance, Toronto was still holding on to eighth place in the Eastern Conference.

Maybe that’s backhanded optimism. The truth is, predicting how the coming six months play out is no easy game. Ken Hitchcock, the St. Louis Blues coach, told TSN that we can expect hockey that’s “excitingly bizarre.” Maybe, as Hitchcock suggested, no lead will be safe. Or maybe, as happened in the lockout-shortened 48-game campaign of 1995, when the trap-loving New Jersey Devils hoisted the Stanley Cup, purveyors of brain-numbing defensive systems will rule.

In any event, there are plenty of questions to answer in Leafland

How will the lockout affect players like Kessel, who has a reputation for thinking of conditioning as something some of the guys do after shampooing? Certainly those who’ve been toiling with the American Hockey League’s Marlies will have a game-shape advantage over their colleagues. Insiders say many NHL veterans who’ve been relatively idle during the stoppage have set themselves up to be exposed or injured or perhaps both.

How will newcomer James van Riemsdyk manage in his role as Toronto’s long-sought top-line centreman? Given he has spent his entire NHL career on the wing, his will be an unenviable adjustment.

How will the Leafs respond to the coaching of Randy Carlyle? They took to him like cattle to the branding iron after he replaced Ron Wilson for last season’s final 18 games (and six wins). Management can only hope the late-season indifference was the product of a doomed team playing out the string and not a defiant group that refused to respond to Carlyle’s old-school style.

Speaking of a position that always trumps coaching, not to mention everything: When is Luongo coming? Sunday’s news of labour peace brought with it plenty of happiness, not to mention the return of a Toronto pastime that had been temporarily abandoned during the stoppage. Trade talk, like puck-related happiness, was swirling around the centre of the hockey universe as it always should. It felt like the balance of things had been restored on Bay St. and beyond.

As astronaut Chris Hadfield tweeted from his command post on the International Space Station: “I am ready to cheer from orbit. Go Leafs!”

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.